RIBA AWARDS / INTERNATIONAL

THE WOHL CENTRE, RAMAT GAN, ISRAEL Studio Daniel Libeskind with local architect The Heder Partnership Client: Bar-Ilan University Another bravura performance from Libeskind brings scale, humanity and a sense of new possibilities to an otherwise workaday university campus. Clearly built to a budget, the building makes a virtue of stark surfaces and uncluttered interiors, and a simple programme - a convention centre - is imbued with enigma and a sense of the numinous.

ILS43 million (£5.2 million). 3,900m 2 173-176

PERRY STREET, NEW YORK, USA Richard Meier & Partners Client: West Perry, LLC These residential towers in Greenwich Village face the Hudson River. Their reductive elegance and stylistic understatement have given luxury urban living a new benchmark. The plan is a combination of Le Corbusier's Domino Frame and the Farnsworth House, stacked on 15 oors. The buildings stand as a timely rebuke to almost all recent riverside residential development in London.

Cost: confidential. 36,620m 2

RED LOCATION MUSEUM OF THE PEOPLE'S STRUGGLE, NEW BRIGHTON, PORT ELIZABETH, SOUTH AFRICA Noero Wolff Architects Client: Red Location Museum of the People's Struggle To build a museum of the apartheid era in the midst of a township that acted as a crucible for the struggle is an extraordinary achievement. The Red Location Museum brilliantly rises to the challenge, using architectural skill of the highest order to produce an unforgettable experience that is both viscerally and intellectually moving.

ZAR24.8 million (£2 million). 3,600m 2

A BRIDGE IN MAOSI VILLAGE, GANSU, CHINA Professor Edward Ng of Chinese University of Hong Kong Client: Maosi Village Government The typical 'architectural' bridge is one that solves the problem of span, context and load in as elegant a manner as possible; a Bridge in Maosi village is modest and chunky but nonetheless brilliantly answers the demands of the context. It is a wonderful example of how inventive architectural and design thinking results in something both delightful and socially empowering.

516,680 yuan (£35,000). 70m long

DULNYOUK PUBLISHERS, PAJU BOOK CITY, SOUTH KOREA Foreign Office Architects Client: Dulnyouk Publishers The success of the project lies not only in the clear diagram that brings landscape into the building, but also in the clarity with which spaces and structure have been organised. The exterior of the building is also intriguing, revealing the split personality of the diagram through the timber-faced garden facade contrasting with the concrete car-park facade.

KRW3,174 million (£1.8 million). 1,800m 2

KASTELLET SCHOOL, OSLO, NORWAY div.A arkitekter as Client: Kastellett School Kastellet School brings the forest that surrounds it into the children's daily lives: in the timber vertical brises soleil and the wooden decking between the classrooms. A hierarchy of indoor spaces reects the latest thinking in education in Norway, allowing for teaching in large lecture halls or small tutorial groups. This is an exquisite place in which to grow up.

NOK177.5 million (£15.6 million). 6,700m 2

CANADIAN WAR MUSEUM, OTTAWA, CANADA Moriyama and Teshima/Griffiths Rankin Cook Architects Client: Canadian War Museum This building takes a number of contemporary architectural tropes and fuses them in a remarkably coherent manner.

The wondrous routes over and through the structure set up a series of poignant and thrilling relationships between past and present, inside and outside, the brutal and the human.

CDN$96 million (£77 million). 40,860m 2

TERRENCE DONNELLY CENTRE FOR CELLULAR AND BIOMOLECULAR RESEARCH, TORONTO, CANADA Behnisch Architekten with Architects Alliance Client: University of Toronto The new sciences demand new spaces and this building dexterously provides them. Airy laboratories; a multitude of informal break-out spaces for those snatched conversations in which 80 per cent of breakthroughs are made; a connection back to nature and an entrance sequence to die for - together these summon up the dynamism of discovery.

CDN$65 milliion (£32 million). 20,500m 2

BRITISH COUNCIL, LAGOS, NIGERIA Allies and Morrison Client: British Council The client needed a building that conveyed openness, transparency and accessibility, while providing high security arrangements for its occupants.

The material palette of white rendering, exposed concrete and locally sourced iroko timber, combined with the majestic height of the facade, helps to evoke both vernacular informality and the authority proper to a quasi-diplomatic institution.

NGN189.5 million (£800,000). 750m 2

ZURICH AIRPORT, SWITZERLAND Grimshaw Client: Unique (Flughafen Zürich AG) These new buildings at Zurich Airport put the style that has been largely lacking for half a century or more back into air travel. Eight years in the building, the new airside and landside centres link and make sense of the two existing terminals, instead of replacing them with one; this environmental sensitivity is typical of the entire project.

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